Improving Copy Web in Visual Web Developerhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/bgold/archive/2004/10/20/245190.aspxI've spent a lot of time in the last week evaluating the Copy Web experience inside Visual Web Developer. When using it, I ran into some confusion and I wanted to see what your opinons were. If you have used Copy Web, let me know your thoughts. What doen-USTelligent Evolution Platform Developer Build (Build: 5.6.50428.7875)What about the database?http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bgold/archive/2004/10/20/245190.aspx#251692Wed, 03 Nov 2004 14:50:00 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:251692John HogeIn my development projects, I like to do as much as possible in SQL Stored Procedures. My present workflow is to use Dreamweaver for front end UI work and Query Analyser to write SPROCs. That way I can build up a file of ALTER PROC and ALTER TABLE statments to go along with a new set of files I am sending with dreamweaver. Once I successfully run the SQL commands and upload the files to a test server, I can do update the production server with confidence.
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<br>If Visual Web Developer writes a lot of the stored procedures through the GUI, how do you maintain a set of changes to be applied to test and production servers? If there is no way to do this, then all the automation features of VWD have a chance of making a big mess in a production environment.
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<br>Thanks<div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=251692" width="1" height="1">RE: Improving Copy Web in Visual Web Developerhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/bgold/archive/2004/10/20/245190.aspx#249234Thu, 28 Oct 2004 19:58:00 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:249234Tim HibbardI think it works well. I only use it for web services and my personal site. I don't like that it asks you to overwrite files halfway though the process. It makes it hard to push Copy Web and go away for a couple minutes. Maybe an option that says &quot;Always overwrite files&quot;.<div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=249234" width="1" height="1">re: Improving Copy Web in Visual Web Developerhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/bgold/archive/2004/10/20/245190.aspx#245690Thu, 21 Oct 2004 15:19:00 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:245690Jeff ParkerPeronsonally it works exactly like I expect it to.
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<br>I have to agree with stuart your talking about with Syncronization. I think that would be a new feature that needs to be defined in the UI seperately. When you talk of Syncronization here is what I envision and what I see as really useful.
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<br>A defined web project. All code is on a dev server or local PC. You can set up the live server, or servers as in a web farm or a distribution point as in a simple directory. When you get all your change control aproved and your ready to cut the project you simply click a button and the code required to run gets blasted out to the production environment. However would be nice to be able to configure this per web site and have a static way to just set deploy or copy options options and leave it alone.
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<br>Now here is the key thing, if you do anything like Front page does it, well then it is useless we do not want extra stuff added to our pages because of this feature. To the web project file, fine, no extra stuff to our pages. Also allow options not to delete new content on the server, for example one of my bigger sites allows uploading of files and so on this site is extremely dynamic, user files constantly change, Code base and ASPX rarely change. But if I am in sync mode and I delete something non .net like a pdf file or something on the test environment, I do not want VS to delete it on syncronization. Instead I would like to have the live site pull that dynamic content down and delete the deleted user stuff from my dev site. That way my dev site is more in sync with what is going on in the real environment.
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<br>Hope that helps you out, I really love the copy feature, but give me a sync feature that works like that I am golden<div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=245690" width="1" height="1">re: Improving Copy Web in Visual Web Developerhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/bgold/archive/2004/10/20/245190.aspx#245364Wed, 20 Oct 2004 21:55:00 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:245364John S.It currently works like every other FTP or web dev program I've used (asks for server, user/pass and default directory), which is good. It's fairly simple (for web devs especially) and makes good use of familiar site transfer conventions. These are big plusses for me<div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=245364" width="1" height="1">re: Improving Copy Web in Visual Web Developerhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/bgold/archive/2004/10/20/245190.aspx#245240Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:04:00 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:245240StuartThis sounds like the question is phrased backwards. &quot;What do you want Copy Web to do?&quot; presumes the existence of a Copy Web function when that might *not* be what we want in the first place.
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<br>Seems to me that there are two separate functions that require different terminology in the UI. Furthermore, both of them are valuable in different situations and both should be provided.
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<br>One is the FTP-like interface most people are used to. This is very useful if you need detailed control over the arrangement of files on the other side, or if you want to manually copy individual subsets of files, etc. I'd call this something like &quot;Manage live server files&quot; or something (hopefully you can do better than that) to make it clear that operations beyond simple one-way copying are permitted (although perhaps this name goes too far the other way and the name should include *some* hint that copying is possible using this tool).
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<br>Another is the synchronization function that you're describing in current VS05. I'd call this &quot;Synchronize Web&quot; or &quot;Sync to Live Server&quot; or something because it's very definitely not a &quot;Copy&quot; operation (&quot;Copy&quot; strongly implies a once-off operation, not an ongoing process of synchronization).
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<br>Note that I didn't call either of these &quot;Copy Web&quot; :)<div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=245240" width="1" height="1">